


Beachcoma

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Lifes Rich Pageant [2]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), College Radio, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Music, Recreational Drug Use, Relationship Negotiation, Vulnerability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 10:10:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20388022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: '92-'95, fugue in three parts. We all invent ourselves, and you know me...





	Beachcoma

** I.  
Summer 1992 **

When Richie’s elbow healed, they drove to the coast in stop-and-go traffic on Route 1 listening to the college radio from Lewiston, then from Waterville, then from Orono. It was July and for months already they had been going to the quarry, where Eddie had made a big show of complaining about having to tenderly wrap Richie’s cast in contractors’ garbage bags secured with rubber bands and packing tape whilst standing and breathing very close to him, and so in the sunshine through the windshield he was obsessively comparing the difference in color between his left and right forearms. The right one, which had been languishing in the cast since fucking April, appeared like the arm of a feral child locked in a basement for seven years and reported on scare-mongering local news and in assorted anonymous novelizations. In between obsessively comparing forearms he was obsessively bending the healed elbow just out of the novelty of the sensation. Lately, because he had been obliged to sell all his Ritalin in order to be able to afford bus tickets to see Blur in Boston, he had catalogued at least three unique obsessive behaviors per day, mostly because these were pointed out to him by Eddie. 

Eddie was the forever obsessive behavior. About this he did not judge nor preen. It just was. To wit, he reached across the center console to carefully still Richie’s elbow in process of focused bending. 

“Maybe you didn’t really process the blood covenant the doctor basically made you swear to,” Eddie said, “but the most important part of it was, be fucking gentle with that thing.” 

“Ask your mom how gentle I can be.” 

Eddie warily cast his gaze askance. “She doesn't know what I know,” he said. Basically lobbed this like a molotov cocktail. Richie shivered; it was the shiver Eddie had been looking for, so he let go. 

Usually they just made out in the car. Once, memorably, in Eddie’s bedroom while his mom was sleeping in her chair downstairs by the TV, but they were drunk and quickly fell asleep. Besides, it was hard with the broken elbow. The music was of highest import to Richie upon these occasions so he had taken to going about his day with a sloppily dubbed cassette of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s _Darklands _tucked in his pocket next to his wallet for emergencies. At the quarry, Bev had gone through his wallet for cash for the ice cream truck while his back was turned, and then she said, “Trash mouth, what is this?” 

Holding the tape in its unmarked jewel case tremulously aloft. The sun glinted off it. In the shade, slathered in sunscreen, Eddie folded his arms carefully cross his chest. 

“It’s just Eddie’s mom and her Magic Wand,” Richie yelled from the water before Bill and Ben shoved him under. 

“She hasn’t seen me like you have,” Richie told Eddie in the car. “I mean, she likes me to be really tough.” 

“Tough!” Eddie exclaimed. “You’re like a screaming baby bird.” 

This was too good. He had basically set it up like a Little League dad with a dog-chewed baseball on a tee! “Why don’t you drop your worm in my mouth, huh, Eds?” 

Eddie’s eye roll was basically a full-body contortion of extreme horror and disgust. Richie cackled but also something warm and sticky like hot chocolate with marshmallows melted in it fell over inside him and spilled everywhere. 

“Stop fucking bending your elbow,” Eddie said, watching the road intently with hands on the wheel at ten and two. “Maybe I will.” 

\--

On the Day Of, Eddie had waited with him in the emergency room and then when the doctor came had squeezed his unhurt hand and also stood. “I’m going to go get your bike,” he said. 

“But — ”

“Your friend can’t come with you, son,” the doctor told them, “unfortunately.” 

He got undressed behind a pale blue curtain and put on a funny crinkly white paper vest as he had been instructed. When the doctor came back in he was accompanied by a pretty nurse and together they gently unstuck all the taped patches from Richie’s arm and hip and knees. “Did you do this yourself,” the doctor asked him. 

Richie nearly dissolved in laughter at the thought. “My friend,” he said. 

“He did a great job,” the nurse observed. “No infection.” 

I just told him I love him and he said okay, Richie didn’t tell them. He lay down on a table under a funny camera and they draped a heavy apron over him and then the nurse arranged his arm whilst from the other room the doctor took pictures. When these pictures were developed, the doctor studied them against a blacklight while the nurse disappeared and came back with a blue cup of large pills. “Painkillers and antibiotics,” she said. He put them on his tongue and then she handed him a glass of water. 

The doctor showed him the place inside his arm that was broken on the picture with a laser pointer. “We’re going to have to wrap it from here to here. Are you ready?” 

He wished Eddie was with him. The painkiller had made him woozy. The doctor and the nurse cleaned the wounds again, and set the bone, which hurt, and then proceeded to mummify him in plaster-dipped cloth strips. He was thinking about how, in the car, at the stoplight over the Androscoggin on Route 121, Eddie had reached across the shifter and stroked the open palm of his hand. 

“You don’t love me,” Richie had noted. 

“Almost,” Eddie said, brow furrowing. “I’m getting there.” 

He understood uniquely now why people confessed to random shit under torture because everything hurt so badly and all he wanted to do was talk. “I want to kiss you and, like, everything,” he said. 

“I almost kissed you last night,” Eddie told him, which basically felt like being repeatedly stabbed. “It felt like having a fucking magnet inside my face and you were the other end of the magnet. Did you feel that too?” 

That’s the feeling of “Rhythm of Cruelty” by Magazine, Richie would have said had he had more of his wits about him. _I brought your face down on my head, it was something I rehearsed in a dream… _

Back in the present the doctor said, “Are you alright, Richard?” 

He nodded. 

“Does it still hurt?” the nurse asked. She passed him a box of tissues from somewhere, which was how he realized he was crying. Again! He wondered if psychedelic drugs had this kind of impact on everyone or otherwise if this should be a lesson about the circumstances under which he allowed himself to feel normal human emotions. 

“We’re almost done.” 

When it was over Richie was obliged to sit on the exam table for a while longer as the plaster set. The nurse went out into the waiting room and came back with Eddie. She smiled between the two of them gently and then she went out through the blue curtains and Eddie stepped really close to him and Richie put his head against Eddie’s chest. 

“Your bike’s in my trunk,” Eddie said, rubbing his back. “You look like King Tut.” 

“I do not,” Richie said, unable to summon any better comeback. 

“They told me that you shouldn’t operate heavy machinery for the rest of the day,” Eddie told him. Richie could hear his voice but also feel it vibrating through the sensitive bones in his skull, and he closed his eyes. “And they asked me if you were being abused. I was like, he’s just acting like a kicked puppy because he’s hungover! You should hear him on a good day! You would be asking _me _if I’m being abused!” 

\--

“Why does any human person ever drive to the fucking coast,” Richie asked when the dashboard clock registered hour three since Eddie had pulled up in front of the Tozier residence four minutes before ten. “My ass is numb.” 

“Lobster rolls,” Eddie reminded him. “The ocean, um, the sand, sailboats, fish, lighthouses…” 

“What do you think it’s like to live in New York City, Eds? Or Paris or something? You think they want to kill tourists as badly as we do?” 

“You can’t actually want to — ” 

“I wish that an alien spaceship would just descend and beam up all this traffic and subject all these people from New Jersey to anal probes,” Richie said, meaning it, though he looked toward the window because saying “anal probes” had made him feel hot in the face, “so that we can just beeline directly to the lobster rolls.” 

They were stopped at a light but still Eddie would only take one hand off the wheel to wildly gesticulate. “Most of these people are Mainers like us and they’re going to work and going to the beach like normal fucking people, Richie!” 

Richie put his head against the window. When the light turned Eddie accelerated through it and managed to get the car into second gear before traffic slowed back down to a slow crawl again.

“Let's play cows,” Richie said. 

“I’ve seen literally two cows.” 

“So you have two!” 

They drove on for what seemed like forever in amicable silence, looking for cows. The radio played the Smiths and the Psychedelic Furs. Richie spotted something black and white at the side of the road and screamed but it was just a cow-shaped sign for a run-down ice cream shop and they bickered for a few minutes about whether it counted, during which time they passed a graveyard that Richie noticed first, bringing them both to a count of zero cows and back to a less amicable silence. 

“I’m bored,” Richie said. 

“I spy something blue,” Eddie tried. 

“My balls.” 

“Oh my god…” 

They were saved from mutually assured destruction by the radio, which faded into “My Tulpa” by Magazine. Richie gasped in delighted surprise with such ostentatious volume that Eddie instinctively slammed in the brakes of the car and nearly threw them both through the windshield. As soon as Richie had recovered from being choked by his seatbelt he reached for the volume knob to crank the radio as loud as it would go. 

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Eddie shouted over the music. 

“What?” 

“I thought you saw — could’ve killed us both — totaled the fucking car — ” 

“What?” 

Of course he could actually hear but wasn’t listening. He tried out air keyboards above his bent-up knees, miming the flirty organ riff. _I wanna see you, don’t you wanna see me… _

“You don’t actually want to talk or anything…” 

“Eds! Later!” 

“You have the vinyl at home!” 

Richie laughed, because he had played this very song so many times that the record he had at home didn’t sound quite as good as it sounded now on the radio, even through the thin layer of static the signal had gathered as it moved southerly at the speed of sound across the hills and vales from the UMaine campus. Eddie rolled his eyes along with his entire face again. How to ask him, when the song was over of course, do you hear the yearning? Do you taste it? That was me waiting for you to get your shit together! 

The best part of the song was just after the chorus when the cymbal noise dropped out and cut to the distorted downbeat guitar and Devoto singing, “You can touch yourself anytime.” For a delirious moment Richie thought Eddie looked at him. Then he was sure he did. The look, which was doubly surprising given the car was still gently rolling, shifted from the radio to Richie’s eyes to Richie’s mouth into the collar of his shirt and lower. One did not have to be a sexual genius to interpret the intended meaning. 

“Right here, Eds?” 

“You said you were bored.” 

An earlier line from the song surprised Richie’s mind. _My skin wants to crawl back home to ma… _

Richie made for his seatbelt to take it off but Eddie stopped him with the stilling hand again. “Leave it on,” he said. 

“Ooh, Richie, leave it on…” 

“Are you gonna do this or what?” 

It made remarkable sense to just kind of twist in his seat and put his back to the passenger side window. The traffic was moving quickly on the southbound side of Route 1, not that Richie calculated for this or even really cared. He thanked every deity he could quickly bring to mind for the renewed use of his right hand, and shoved it in his swim trunks. There was not all that much coaxing that needed to be done. He made a little sound, not entirely by accident, and watched Eddie swallow. That did it! 

Being as the most profound forces animating his life as a teenager in rural Maine were sexual frustration, boredom, and obsessive thinking, he was usually really good at this, but he was out of practice. He hadn’t remembered how much elbow the necessary movements required and it was starting to twang but the twang was good, like, really good. To wit, “Be careful,” Eddie said. 

He didn’t usually talk while he did this! His own voice was — well, it gave him shivers too. The sound of it literally straightened Eddie’s spine. Just the sound of Richie saying, “I am being careful.” 

Eddie stole a look at him. His eyes followed Richie’s forearm toward the waist of the shorts, and then they forcibly stopped. Then Eddie was obliged to slam in the brakes of the car before they rear-ended the silver VW Beetle in front of them. “You must be out of practice,” Eddie noted. 

The clinical remove of this approach was masterfully titillating. You might not have noticed the funny violin-string tremor in his voice unless you were Richie, who put the side of his face against the headrest, straining his sweaty cheek against the soft fabric. “Not as good with the left,” he managed. 

“Remind me never to borrow a pillow at your house again.” 

He couldn't even come up with a joke about Eddie’s mother, though hundreds should have been obvious. He wanted to shut his eyes but couldn’t. Shutting his eyes might have been moot anyway because usually when he shut his eyes at this juncture it was to more efficiently think of Eddie. 

“Your elbow, trashmouth,” Eddie said. Literally to spite him. There was absolutely no reason for any of this but spite. “Take it easy.” 

Richie pinched his own thigh hard with his free hand, hard enough probably it instantly started to bruise. He thought he kind of laughed but it just sounded like a something else. Like a — he hated this, but he had also read _Lady Chatterly’s Lover _— like a mouth-closed moan, trapped behind his teeth. Eddie took a kind of surprised breath and then he turned to Richie (it was a red light) and eyes slotted in eyes and it was over. It took like a longer floating time than he-thought-he-remembered usual to be over, probably just because it had been so long since he had really done this right, and he realized his eyes were closed. His whole face was in a knot. He untied it, and Eddie was just blinking at him. The radio was playing ads for boat insurance and whale watch cruises now and since neither of them had bothered to turn the volume down after the song ended the jaunty voices screamed through the car. 

“There’s tissues in my second fanny pack,” Eddie said finally. 

Richie swooned. 

\--

After the hospital, they went to the diner, where Richie put his head and the palm of the working hand on the cool table. The painkiller they’d given him was something else. From behind the bar the surly waitress was watching, so he closed his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re on another drug odyssey,” Eddie said from across the table. “What did they even give you?” 

“Something really majorly good.” 

“Remember when I broke my arm?” 

In the darkness Richie brushed against it. It was dripping down the back of his neck. He opened his eyes. It almost surprised him that it was light outside, though it was overcast and drizzling against the fingerprinted diner windows. He couldn’t even feel afraid. There was a big soft pad around that too. “Kind of,” he said to Eddie after probably way too long not saying anything. 

“They gave me something. That’s probably why all that is so fuzzy.” 

How come it’s fuzzy for me too, Richie might have said were he not mildly dissociating. You sure as hell did not cop me any of your child-strength oxys. 

“My mom ground it up and put it in milkshakes,” Eddie seemed to recall suddenly. “She fucking dosed me.” 

“Your mom is like Jerry Garcia,” Richie agreed. “Except not fun.” 

Eddie laughed but it was kind of spiteful and bitter, like biting a grape seed and numbing your tongue. The jukebox in Richie’s brain dropped the needle on the Clean’s “Point That Thing Somewhere Else.” “Were you having fun last night?” Eddie asked him. Basically grabbed the back of his head and rubbed his nose in the meltwater of his brains on the carpet of reality. “Are you having fun now?” 

“It’s not about _fun_, Eds.” 

“What’s it about?” 

“Expanding one’s perception.” 

“Couldn’t you just have fucking smoked pot?” 

Richie sat up and leaned back in the booth. Just about every conceivable movement was awkward with all the tender places, not to mention the quantity of major joints that had been immobilized by the cast. It was a nauseating mindfuck to have gone from the experience of mentally chasing the route of the still-exploding universe to this opiate-induced squishy room. The nature of it was that he couldn’t even be upset about the padded cell; in fact, it felt fucking great. 

“My parents are going to kill me,” he laughed. The waitress brought their food, silent, studied each of them in turn, tip-to-tail, glaring. When she dropped it on the table one of Richie’s fries flopped weakly from the plate onto the paper placemat emblazoned with ads for local businesses and he immediately lost his entire appetite. 

Eddie waited until the waitress left, and then he upended the maple syrup dispenser over his French toast. “I’ll protect you,” he said. 

Richie almost went face down in his BLT. Instead he devoured everything before him in approximately thirty seconds flat, approached a coma, thought he fell asleep, next thing he knew was leaning out of the passenger’s seat of Eddie’s car pulled over on the side of Route 26, vomiting profusely into the gravel and the dry pine needles, seatbelt still on, Eddie having reached across from the drivers’ seat to awkwardly pat his back. The dinging door, the rain and the forest-sound. R.E.M. tape in the stereo — Eddie’s favorite album, so he said when pressed, _Reckoning_. _Wrap your heel in bones of steel_, Richie considered as Stipe sang, spitting acid in the wet dust.

\--

At Matheson’s, the best lobster shack in the state by their experience, on the coast near Owls Head Lighthouse, Richie went in the single stall bathroom and locked the door and splashed water on his face which was red. He wondered if that really just happened. He touched his forehead to the mirror like in that scene at the end of _Twin Peaks_ and laughed maniacally. Then he went back out onto the porch where Eddie was, waiting for their order at a picnic table he evidently found disgusting. He was being menaced by a seagull which Richie chased away, shouting, “Begone!” Then he threw himself down on the bench opposite Eddie with limbs akimbo and made sure to take a swig from his bottle of birch beer with as much visible tongue as was humanly possible. It worked, because Eddie flushed and looked past him toward the sea. “Let’s move to Matinicus,” Richie said. 

“Where?” 

“It’s like a distant haunted island twenty miles out.” 

“How do you know it’s haunted?” 

“It has to be! It’s all the way out in the middle of the ocean!” 

A pimply teen who could have been either of them in an alternate universe arrived at the picnic table with their lobster rolls, looked between them judgmentally, and slipped away again. Richie elevated his middle finger toward the disappearing back, and Eddie reached across the table and dragged his hand down by the wrist to pin it against the table. “Did you wash your hands,” he said. 

Richie shivered. He knew he should probably try to stop doing that but it was going to be hard. “Yeah,” he said; not really a lie, because he had rinsed them, just not with soap. Eddie had pinned his wrist gently, because it belonged to his hurt elbow, and he could easily have bucked the grip, but he didn’t want to. He could feel the sun against the sheer-pale skin inside his forearm, gleefully sucking up vitamin D and UV radiation. Eddie’s hand, which was warm, exuded some other kind of radiation. The jukebox in Richie’s head dropped the needle on Pavement’s “Perfume V” — _she’s got the radioactive and it makes me feel okay… _

Eddie let go of him in favor of a lobster roll, which he inspected carefully before devouring in approximately four bites. “Stop looking at me like that and eat,” he told Richie. “We drove all the way out here…” 

“Like what?” 

Eddie swallowed. “I can't say it in polite company.” 

Evidently he was talking about the seagulls, who had started to get close again. 

“I’m just looking,” Richie said. “You were looking, you know, in the car.” 

“I was not.” 

“Were too.” 

Richie reached into the cardboard tray for the other lobster roll. This too he endeavored to eat with as much tongue as was possible. Eddie watched him back, the lecherous hypocrite. His face was flushed high in the apples of his cheeks (a metaphor Richie had thought was lame bullshit until this exact moment) but it might have just been the sun, or the shadow through the red umbrella. 

“Let’s,” Eddie said. The breeze moved his hair, and he looked out toward the sea, and his brow furrowed around his eyes. Then he tightened his lips (a little slick with butter) to almost nothing, and then he tried again. “Let’s just see what happens.” 

“I’m in love with you,” Richie said with his mouth full, “and I want you all the time.” 

“Oh my god.” Eddie covered his eyes. “Gross. Please — ” 

Richie swallowed. “You make me feel,” he said. He had meant to say something else but it kind of stopped there. 

Eddie’s voice was kind of exasperated, kind of hopeful. Kind of coaxing, like a teacher who really wanted to believe you had done the reading and knew the answer. “Feel what?” 

There was a feeling; he knew because he felt it. Perhaps there was not a word. There was an approximation: “Like a natural woman,” he said. 

Otherwise it could have been Tina Turner singing “River Deep, Mountain High” — as a very young child, he was dancing with his mother in the living room, or otherwise they sat on the couch together and she turned up the stereo as loud as it would go and held him close to her and he felt them run into the sound and the sound run into them, like — well, there was basically no fitting metaphor, except for what it really was. Like falling in love. Maybe like the look of the sun from underwater. 

Eddie put the heels of his hands in his eyes and signed long-sufferingly. A seagull landed on the end of the table and stared at them with its beady eyes. It didn’t move even when Richie flapped his hand at it. 

“Richie,” Eddie said at last, folding his skinny arms over his chest; he looked a little smug, like he’d discovered the key: “it’s like the Stones said, man, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need.” 

\--

After lunch they found a campsite in the state park, at the northern end of the peninsula around the bluff from the lighthouse, set up the tent, raced each other screaming over the glass-sharp slate shards toward the water. Eddie was ahead and slipped on seaweed and in the split second in which his balance failed before he righted himself and went charging onward Richie’s entire being turned inside out. The strike of phantom remembrance — basically like reaching desperately for something that was floating away — 

“Are you scared, trash mouth?” 

Eddie was up to his waist in the water and the light off it touched his belly and the undersides of his forearms in funny prismatic shapes, shifting like the sun through leaves. 

“Is it cold?” 

“Of course it’s fucking cold!” 

He raked his joined fists through the water to send a mighty splash Richie’s way, but was surprised by a cold wave from behind him and shrieked. The sucking tide dragged the flaky stones against the great scrape of slate that ringed the entire coast, shaking like maracas or a last pill… Richie ran into the water until he couldn't run anymore, and then collapsed. The current lifted him, and his glasses off his nose until he grabbed them and held them in a fist. He felt his hair float away from his face. Himself float away from himself. The salt stung when he opened his eyes. Everything was a bright green blur and the sun through the water was like Tina Turner singing “River Deep, Mountain High.” Audible only with held breath in this enforced silence was the moon-drone that anchored the movement of everything on this fucking planet. Everything! It was breathing. It was the most beautiful song in the world but you could only listen for so long before it started to crush your lungs in its pressurized fist. 

When he came up Eddie was close to him. Even without glasses the panic in his face was evident and sort of chest-warming, like taking a shot of whiskey. Richie put the glasses back on to get the hi-fi touch. “You look like a wet labradoodle,” Eddie said. 

The jukebox in Richie’s head dropped the needle on the soul-scouring opening chords of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” 

“I’ll shake on you,” Richie said breathlessly. 

“Don’t you fucking — ”

He did, so violently it made him dizzy and he had to kneel in the water for a while, closing his eyes when the waves went over him, until the vertigo stopped. Worth it, because Eddie backed away from him and tripped over something in the water and fell in, and he came up a little flushed, and his hair was swept back from his face showing his widows peak and his perfect tiny ears. 

“Underwater,” Richie told him, quietly because this was a secret, “you can hear a song.” 

Eddie looked at him quizzically, but he didn’t say anything. Eventually he knelt too, facing seaward toward the end of the cove, and he tilted his head back to put his ears underwater. The light off the water spangled against his chin. He looked at Richie for a second and then toward the sky and Richie reached toward him underwater and wrapped a hand around his ribcage. Eddie closed his eyes. Something larger than them, which contained them inside its belly, was holding its breath. Then Eddie stood up again, hair dripping. “I heard it,” he said. 

“You did?” 

“Yeah, it was your mom and her Magic Wand.” 

Richie tackled him. They chased each other underwater like seals, grabbing wrists and ankles, emerging to breathe and laugh, eyes turning red, fingers and toes pruning. Eventually, exhausted, they dragged each other back up the beach toward their campsite, stomachs rumbling at the smell of everybody else’s barbecue. “Do you think those people would give us hot dogs in exchange for sexual favors,” Richie asked, only partly kidding. 

“I have sandwiches!” Eddie announced. “I have chips, I have cookies…” 

“I just want to shove a huge, meaty frankfurter in my mouth.” 

Eddie groaned. “Will it shut you up?” 

Richie made sure Eddie was looking at him, and touched his tongue to his lip. “Want to find out?” 

At the campsite, Richie lay down on the picnic table and Eddie unlocked the car, having hidden the keys in the wheel well while they swam. Richie surveyed the scene. At the next campsite over through the trees a really butch dad was flipping burgers at a charcoal grill, shoulders stretching the logo of his UNH t-shirt. "What about that guy," Richie said, pointing when Eddie looked up. 

Eddie caught sight of the guy and shook his head long-sufferingly. “I can't watch you do that,” he said. Then he leaned over into the trunk of the car to dig out the cooler and the shorts… the shorts were the shorts. This had to be intentional. “I’ll spontaneously combust from jealousy.” 

“Really?” 

“Or maybe visceral disgust. I don't know. I wouldn't mind a hot dog.” 

Emerging from the trunk, he passed Richie a can of orange soda from the cooler, and then, mind-bogglingly, a fucking flask! Richie took it as though Eddie had given him a trunk of jewels from a tomb. “Who are you,” he moaned. 

“I’m your man,” Eddie said. “You know the Leonard Cohen song?” 

“Do I… do I _know _the Leonard Cohen song! Edward!” 

Richie was in flames. He got into the fetal position to more efficiently roll out the fire where it was consuming him all over his body and inside his very soul. But, “Get up so I can make us dinner,” Eddie commanded, standing on the picnic table bench to hover over him. 

“I can’t! I can't move! You can't just — evoke that song!” 

Eddie took the flask from his hand and unscrewed it and took a swig. Then he turned away to hide the face he made. Not to be outdone Richie got up and snagged it from his hand and took a bigger swig. He tried really hard not to make a face at all, but his eye twitched uncontrollably for a few seconds. It was actually pretty decent tequila. “Bev gave it to me,” Eddie confessed. “Do you want a sandwich or what.” 

He assembled BLTs with items from the cooler and then they brought the sandwiches, the flask, sodas, and a bag of potato chips out to the edge of the trees and spread a salt-sticky towel out on the warm slate scrape. The sun was sinking over the bluff to the west dragging purple-gold light behind it over the pines and the still water, and as they ate they watched the last ferry to Vinalhaven slip past the mouth of the cove toward the islands and the sea. Eventually it was dark, and cold; they finished the tequila, retreated to the car for sweatshirts, and the stars came on overhead along with the lights from the houses across the cove. Seaward toward Penobscot Bay no land was visible for leagues, but sometimes lights from boats moved like comets over the dark water. A foghorn sounded somewhere far off and at another campsite back amidst the pines a woman laughed for a long time. Eddie told a non-scary ghost story from that summer camp for kids with chronic illnesses he had gone to for a few summers, until Richie started laughing too hard for him to go on. 

“It couldn’t be too scary or people would have, like, asthma attacks,” Eddie explained. 

“Yourself included.” 

“Yeah, myself included!” 

The sense-memory of sun, the booze, the salt, the hypnotic tide-drone — like moving through a long dream. They watched the moon seep out from under the rim of the world and glow against the water in a stunned quietude. 

“You looked really,” Eddie said, breaking the silence. “Like really something.” 

“Wait, what?” 

“When you — you know. In the car.” 

“When I came? When I jerked off in your car on Highway 1?” 

Eddie flushed salmonberry red, so vividly it was visible in the pale light. “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. “I think I’m going fucking crazy.” 

“It’s the repression,” Richie explained. “It’s all your pent up bullshit flooding your tiny body.” 

Eddie looked out over the moony water and shook his head. Like in profound disbelief at just about everything. 

“Or maybe it’s my raw sexual energy,” Richie went on. “You haven't even touched me. Now you see what your mom was up against all these years.” 

“Oh my god, shut up,” Eddie said. He looked around a little warily and then he said, “Put your head in my lap.” 

Richie did not even hesitate. Eddie’s swim trunks were still damp and the salt had threaded in the fine dark hair on his thighs just enough to see in the moonlight. He shifted Richie’s hair from his face and touched the yet-unhealed shiny red spot from the bike accident, between his nose and lip. Then the scar in Richie’s eyebrow, from the penultimate fight with Belch, freshman year on the kickball diamond before gym class. That had been kind of a suicidal fight, Richie remembered, and basically nothing else about it, except the unique and theretofore unfelt sensation of blood streaming down the back of his throat. Stan, who was the only one of the other losers in the class, shouting from the periphery. Eddie and Bill and Ben in the cafeteria at lunch the next day jostling for a look at the stitches. When the family doctor asked him, do you ever feel like hurting yourself, he had thought of that fight. But he still said no. 

“I can’t believe I made you do that,” Eddie said. 

“You didn’t make me do anything,” Richie told him, closing his eyes. “I wanted to.” 

“Why?” 

Dear god, he was serious. His thumb was in the corner of Richie’s mouth tasting like salt and spilled Orange Crush. He did not have to open his eyes to tell what Eddie’s face looked like. “Isn’t it obvious?” he said. 

“No! It’s fucking not!” 

“I’ll make you a mixtape,” Richie told him, already mentally compiling the tracklist. The Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” Liz Phair’s “Flower,” “Rory Rides Me Raw” by the Vaselines… 

“Oh my god, Richie, can you please try?” 

The dam opened, and everything that rushed into his head sounded like a shitty line from a horrible romantic comedy or else like something that if he said aloud would become real, way too real, like Frankenstein’s-monster real — thoughts he would hardly have admitted to himself let alone to their object, thoughts that were just sounds, thoughts that were just lyrics that maybe didn’t exist yet… The onslaught of words rushed him like the tidal wave of blood pouring out of the elevator in _The Shining_. It still was neither quite enough nor exactly right. 

Something could be evinced from that: “I’m going fucking crazy too,” he managed. 

Eddie's hands stilled in his hair and for a moment he worried, with a cold stone falling through his gut, that he had said the wrong thing. Then he felt the fact of Eddie’s mouth against his lower lip, like a butterfly. There was not even enough time to shake the startled love-struck stillness before it was over. “Good,” Eddie said softly, mostly just breath, so that Richie felt the word against his mouth. 

It was late when they retreated toward the tent, half-asleep, stumbling and clutching each other in the darkness. Eddie somehow had enough of his wits about him to brush his teeth and wash his face in the dingy bathhouse, and by the time he returned to the tent Richie was mostly dreaming, such that the look of his return silhouetted by the moon and the faraway butter light from the campground superintendent’s RV seemed to Richie like a medieval painting of a martyred saint. He arranged his sleeping bag carefully and balled up his sweatshirt for a pillow, emptied his pockets into his sneaker, zipped the tent up, and cheerfully arranged himself on his side like a boy scout. Then he turned toward Richie, shuffling the stiff vinyl fabric of his sleeping bag. “When are you gonna get me back here, man?”

“Wait, what?”

“Cradling you in my arms for an hour while you cried?”

“Are you gonna cry!”

“No! Spoon me, you fucking idiot!” 

Richie did not have to be told twice. Maybe he moved a little overzealously, because Eddie went _oof, _like the air had been shoved out of his lungs, when Richie’s arm settled around his chest. But then he wrapped his clammy palm around the back of Richie's hand and yawned roaringly. His hair was soft from the salt water against Richie’s nose. “Don’t forget to take off your glasses,” he said. 

“I won’t,” said Richie. But he couldn’t very well move his arm now, could he? 

“Go to sleep,” Eddie told him. 

“I am.” 

“I can feel you thinking,” Eddie said, “sleep.” 

He shut his eyes and breathed against the sound of the surf on the beach. Eddie's ribcage rising and falling in rough rhythm. On the edge of sleep he thought he heard that song. 

\--

It did not start in the un-summer. The summer that wasn’t. The summer that someone had taped over, like, for instance, the only time his mother had ever hit him being when she had discovered he had taped over one of her Smokey Robinson live bootleg cassettes (she had about twelve of them and he was out of tapes and the Bates college radio was playing all Factory Records b-sides that were literally only available on vinyl imports that cost hundreds of dollars, so what did she want him to do, he had tried to argue). However you wanted to name that summer, it was kind of after and before, in that it was after he understood that something came on inside his chest, like a ghost light, when he heard Eddie’s bike coming up the road, but before he truly understood the meaning and the gravity of this fact, for instance that if Eddie knew this fact it was unlikely they would ever speak again, and began to behave accordingly, which he managed for a few utterly suffocating years. Death-years. He kept that part of his brain in a permanent chokehold. Don’t touch him, don’t look at him. His every waking hour was a possession of yearning. He picked fights, barely ate, and at last took a page out of his mother’s book, in discovering that the power of music as a panacea for emotional pain was rivaled only by the peerless capability of alcohol. So it was really Eddie’s fault that he was like this in the first place. At least, he felt that way until he went to college and perused his friends’ queer theory textbooks while they were in other rooms. 

Like the snippets of “Tracks Of My Tears” occasionally audible between Joy Division, ESG, and Durutti Column deep cuts on the tape Richie eventually burned because it embarrassed him to look at, memories emerged sometimes from the black spot, usually on the edge of sleep, and he forgot them by the morning, though sometimes they filtered into dreams; they were running together out of the darkness, again and again — 

He smoked a joint before school listening to New Order’s “Temptation.” In those days he would have done anything to remember, because it was probably the best he was ever going to get. 

\--

Richie woke up when the first dawn light started glowing in through the dewy rainfly. Outside the tide hummed and dragged against the beach, pushing and pulling the polished slate shards, droning ever on like an industrial fan. He thought he woke up but turned back and forth into disjointed dreams again for another half hour or so until the sun split the rim of the world and flashed through the thin fabric and pulled up some Venetian blind inside his head. In the night it had gotten warm and they had papered the sweaty tent with discarded layers and sleeping bags and had shifted away from and then towards one another again so that they were lying together in a funny tangle less like a knot than like a coil of slack salt- and sun-washed line on a wharf. Eddie was lying directly on top of Richie’s recently broken elbow and it hurt sort of like it had right when they cut the cast off and it moved out of its right angle bend for the first time in months with a sharp snap shock, like a plastic toy removed from packaging and manipulated by a child, shaking off the factory defects. He had been dreaming about them, he remembered, and a complete dearth of other relevant details. He could not bring himself to move, and he listened to the waves. Eventually he thought he fell asleep again, because he got dropped back in himself feeling guilty, and more than a little afraid, his heart feeling kind of trapped, when Eddie got up and tried gently to move his elbow into a less painful position without waking him up. 

They just clocked each other, half asleep. Eddie’s t-shirt was loose around his neck. Kiss me, Richie thought as hard as he could until Eddie did it. Just a peck, because they hadn’t brushed their teeth. “Does your arm hurt,” Eddie said. 

“No,” Richie lied. 

“Your skin is really weird from being mummified,” Eddie observed. “Like, soft but like old people skin.” 

“You always notice these things about me that… well, not even your mom ever said anything like that.” 

“She’s using you for your body,” Eddie told him with an air of reluctant wisdom. 

“Aren’t you?”

This though Eddie had not touched him nor would he let himself be touched within certain radiuses or bodily jurisdictions. That seemed like a heretofore uncrossed threshold which Richie occasionally imagined himself being carried across like a bride. 

“No,” Eddie said. But he looked! He looked almost brazenly, like maybe he didn’t quite realize this wasn’t a dream. He looked much more confidently than he had the previous afternoon in the car and he looked across Richie’s shoulders and into his belly button, which was only part covered by his ridden-up shirt. “I want to eat your brain,” he said. 

Something happened to Richie’s mind that could only be represented graphically, as in a comic book when a character’s head explodes. 

“Cute, Eds,” he said. “Enjoy the mad cow disease.” 

Eddie ignored this. He unzipped the fabric flaps to open the tent’s little screen windows, and then he lay down again and held Richie’s arm over his chest. They watched a drop of dew roll down the rainfly toward the ground, and then they watched the shadow of a dragonfly land on the top of the tent and preen, or Richie did, because by that time he thought Eddie had fallen asleep. His breath had gotten spread out and slow, and his grip loosened in Richie’s hand, and his mouth unstuck; they were lying so close the little sound was audible over the surf. Richie thought, is it possible to die of love? The jukebox dropped the needle again on “Perfume V” — _she’s got the radioactive and it makes me feel okay… _

The breeze came though the screen. He would not fall asleep again. Could not waste this funny gift. Could not let any bad thing happen to it. 

Listen, brain, he thought into the dusty corners, toward the shaking cardboard boxes and the locked safes, the cobwebs and the creaky floorboards, the boarded windows into the unthinkable rooms, listen, do not fuck this up! 

\--

He did, of course, eventually, in forgivable increments and then badly, basically out of desperation at having failed chemistry and the brief threat he would be forced to repeat twelfth grade; normal teenage fuckups like sex mistakes and accidental insults and vengeful flirtation with others and imperfections of secrecy and overinterpretation of mixtapes (Mazzy Star’s “Halah” was maybe a bad idea), and then the classic teenage fuckup of allowing oneself to believe one’s personal feelings of self-hate and inadequacy were the general public consensus and behaving accordingly, eg like a hermit or something, or someone whose entire family was dead, basically like an alone person, which he was not, though he had essentially defined his entire self-conception this way, he considered as he knelt in the sun picking kale stoned on the verge of emotional or heat collapse (probably both). 

This was the first attempted self-exile, in which, by way of copious drugs and backbreaking farm work, he realized he actually hated being alone, and hated the version of himself he had invented, and was going to have to try something new, though it was unclear exactly what that was, so unclear in fact that he never did it. 

Later, during the second exile, in Massachusetts, he lay in his cotlike dorm bed listening to the Buzzcocks, having eaten some of his roommate’s mushrooms and staring into the lava lamp as though it contained the secrets of the universe. Sometimes he could touch some pure memory which explained it all — could touch it but could not see it. The door slammed shut on it like in Indiana Jones. Sometimes he had awful dreams. Sometimes he woke up in the night and stood by the phone for an hour in attempt to gather the strength to call. Sometimes his elbow hurt. When wasted he picked fights. When massively fucked up he cried. When sober he went to class and marveled that all information messaged his way was like darts of varying sharpness tossed indiscriminately toward a shrinking target. 

Somehow every mistake he made never ended it for good. What’s the word for a curse, but a good one?

\---

\--

-

** II.  
March 1995 **

Eddie did not have a protractor and neither did any of his roommates in the sixth floor walkup in Morningside Heights. When you said Morningside Heights most people thought Columbia, and indeed the apartment building was lousy with kids who had not been accepted in off the waitlist, including Eddie. He took the subway every day down to CUNY, holding the pole with a paper towel. He did not sit down even if the train was empty and refrained from touching his skin to any surfaces. He scheduled his classes around rush hour so that he wouldn’t have to cram on the train with the entire population of New York and all their various germs. When he felt kind of burning and nihilistic he would listen to a cassette in headphones though he knew this was dangerous and maybe he was setting himself up to be mugged. When he felt particularly like doing something bad he listened to an unmarked tape in an unmarked case, which usually he kept in his bedside table with the tissues and vitamins. 

On his way home on a Friday afternoon he went to an office supply store and bought a protractor, then he went to a bookstore and bought a map of New England. He had been thinking about doing this since he received the pamphlet in the mail. Bev had sent it to him and she probably thought she was being nice. Surreptitiously on the street he pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, though he never had been good at checking his temperature like this. In New York everything just felt hot all the time. The heat just stuck in the corners and the wind tunnels. Even in the winter sometimes you would be walking on the street and burning fucking steam would come out of a sewer grate and menace you. But he had been telling himself he wasn’t going to do this and now he was doing this. That seemed like maybe something was wrong. 

With the items in his school bag he walked across town toward the subway, and eventually he dug out his tape player and the unmarked cassette. You had to do this basically like pulling off a bandaid and silence all the mental grumbling by force of noise. That was the Richie Tozier way. Eddie had not bothered to rewind it since the last time he had listened so it came on in the middle of R.E.M.’s “The One I Love.” He turned it up as loud as it would go and descended into the bowels of the earth, ripping off a paper towel from the roll in his bag and using it to push the turnstile as a gaggle of high schoolers watched, laughing so loudly he could hear it over the music. 

Eddie climbed out of the subway at 116th, sweating, and walked to the Columbia library, where he went to the girl at the information desk, who he had been trying to flirt with for months though it seemed she understood something about himself that he didn’t, or wouldn’t. He removed his headphones to drape them around his neck whilst lowering the volume only marginally, so that she could hear the tape was playing the Clean’s “Point That Thing Somewhere Else.” _If you’re willing to say you want me, I’ll faint and know it’s not true…_ “I’m doing a project on college radio,” he told her. 

“Cool. For what class?”

“Um, it’s about histories of counterculture.”

Eddie was actually studying business at CUNY but he enjoyed this person he had invented for the benefit of the information desk girl. It was kind of a Richie person, a right-brain person. 

“So cool. I mean, my sister is at Mount Holyoke and they have the oldest college radio station in America entirely run by women. Bikini Kill played there last year.”

Eddie pretended he knew what she was talking about, nodding enthusiastically. 

“Do you have like, maybe some kind of reference text?” 

She did some searching in her card catalog then escorted him to the third floor stacks. Preppy students in carrels in boat shoes brazenly smoked joints as they clattered word processors and the air was thick with cannabis and B.O. Eddie would have denied this odor made him feel nostalgic and emotional because it also made him feel disgusting. “Here we are,” said the desk girl, gently tugging a thick red tome off a top shelf. “Up to date as of… last year.”

“Thanks!” 

“You probably could write off to any of them, get broadcast schedules and zines and stuff.”

“Cool,” Eddie told her, like he didn’t already have a broadcast schedule for one of them, like this wasn’t why he was doing this monumentally stupid thing he was doing. “Yeah. Good idea.”

“Good luck, Ed.” 

She disappeared, swishing denim skirt fabric. Eddie crouched on the floor and put his headphones back over his ears. The cassette had advanced to “Good” by Better than Ezra, arguably the most insufferable song on the whole insufferable tape. He flipped the book open to the back index and searched for WMUA Amherst 91.1 FM, and then he turned to page 211 as directed. 

The page had basic information about the station, including a logo and slogan — “The Voice of UMass” — and some basic stats. Eddie unearthed the map of New England and a pencil from his bag and proceeded to copy down the transmitter strength and other pertinent information in a margin, trying to recall his limited knowledge of broadcast technology from his short-lived stint in AV Club, a painfully wholesome activity undertaken at his mother’s wishes when he was about twelve. Then he reshelved the book and went out past the stoned seniors in their nooks lining the wall, coughing pointedly. 

Nobody was home at the apartment but still he went into his minute bedroom and closed and locked the door. His back ached from carrying the heavy school bag so he took a Tylenol, checked his messages on his phone (a condition of his mother’s subsidizing his rent was that he have his own receiver at his bedside, and anyway there were no messages), checked his Macroeconomics syllabus and unearthed the textbook and even opened to the necessary page before he realized he was just putting off what needed to be done and indeed what he wanted to do, though the wanting to do felt like it was coming from outside him, like he was bewitched. He found the map and unpackaged the protractor and then he went in his bedside table with the tissues and the vitamins and a few unopened letters and a few opened letters and something that scared him for he didn’t know what reason, a photocopy of an image from a textbook from a world history class, an artist’s rendering of the Venetian leper colony at Poveglia, and retrieved a tightly folded piece of blue paper, which was the WMUA broadcast schedule for Spring semester 1995. Bev had sent it to him along with one of the opened letters, circling the slot at 8pm on Tuesdays, which was called Total Trash with Rich Tozier. 

_RICH_, Eddie had thought the first time he saw it with pure burning… anger did not seem to entirely encompass the feeling. 

Eddie unfolded the pamphlet on the floor beside the map. In a margin, and consulting an old math reference book he found under his bed, generating an insuppressible sneeze attack, he calculated with the information uncovered at the library that the broadcast radius of WMUA was 30 miles. He measured this distance with the protractor on the map to display that this radius encompassed the Pioneer Valley and the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, and stretched north to be occasionally perceptible in Brattleboro, Vermont. 

He sat back on his heels and took a steeling-himself breath. Then he sneezed again. He had had to flip the tape on the way home when it had come to the end of the side, and he had thrown it on his bed still playing, so he could tinnily hear fucking “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by fucking Joy Division. 

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Then he went out into the living room to put some cold spaghetti in the microwave and attempt to find his roommate’s atlas. 

\--

What kind of person just left without saying anything? Well, without saying anything except for the tape they put in your mailbox that your mom found. Eddie bear, what’s this? From the opening strains of the first song he knew what had happened. Also, Richie had been being weird. Weirder than normal and prone to silence. Prone to lying in Eddie’s lap and lying face down in the bed and asking Eddie to just lie on top of him instead of whatever they usually did, which Eddie figured might probably be called sex. To wit, weird! 

He biked over to Richie’s house because it seemed less dramatic than driving. Then he went to the payphone by the diner and called Bev. Bev wasn’t supposed to know (nobody was supposed to know) but she did. Or, based on the stuff she said and the way she said it, she did. “I told him to tell you,” she said. 

“He did it in the most ridiculous possible way.”

His voice sounded like he was going to cry. He didn’t even feel like crying but his voice sounded like crying. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to pitch it down a few octaves. Obviously this was going to happen because Richie had gotten into UMass, and Eddie had too but he had decided to go to New York instead, on the off chance he might be able to transfer into Columbia after being rejected from the wait list. But they were supposed to have the summer, they were supposed to go canoe camping in the Allagash, and then they were supposed to talk about it. 

“He got some job on some organic farm,” she said. “He told me not to tell you that. I mean, I think he did. He was basically incoherent.” 

Eddie tried not to feel a savage joy about that. He should be, he thought, he should be fucking incoherent. 

“Anyway,” Bev said, “not that it will make you feel any better, but he’s in remote Ontario with no phone.” 

Eddie couldn’t help but think about his mom’s frequent lectures about the innate psychopathy of Canadians. “Oh my god,” he said. 

“I can give you the address — ”

“I don’t want it.” 

Bev paused for so long that Eddie briefly thought the payphone had hung up on him. “Bev,” he said. 

“I’m here.” 

“It’s just — ”

“It comes from the same,” Bev tried. “Well, you know where it comes from, right?” 

“Yeah,” Eddie lied. Or maybe he wasn’t lying. 

“It doesn’t excuse anything,” Bev said. “He’s a difficult person.”

\--

After his Macroeconomics class on Tuesday, Eddie left the CUNY campus, skipping his evening Accounting lecture. He was distracted and had had too much coffee so he forgot to push the turnstile of the subway with a paper towel, generating a few moments of mild panic until that was subsumed beneath the larger panic that he was suffering from some kind of brain parasite that was gnawing determinedly on various vital mental pieces controlling a sane person’s thought processes and activities and abilities to let things go. Back in Morningside Heights he went up to the apartment to get his roommate’s atlas, the broadcast radius map, a bottle of water, some snacks, and that night’s pills just in case, and then he went back on the street and found his car, which had recently been scraped against by a fucking bus, at 110th and Amsterdam. He was obliged to get gas, and then he got on the West Side Highway. It was 4pm and looked like rain. He put on the radio and found a news station and listened until the weather played and affirmed thunderstorms were imminent, and that sunset was at 5:35pm. Then he tuned the radio to 91.1FM and turned up the static. He understood that particularly dramatic weather events might shrink the broadcast radius considerably and for a moment considered turning around, but he had already paid the toll to leave Manhattan, and he had already put gas in the car, and there was already a parasite eating his brain, and the parasite said, you’re going to do this anyway, so you might as well do it now! 

He drove onward into the coming night. 

\--

Being anyone’s lover sounded like a great big mess. At least, this could easily be inferred from what everyone said. Eddie understood that feelings were like a contagion. His mother had explained this, and so had the health teacher, in one particularly embarrassing class during that particularly embarrassing week when nobody looked up from their desk lest they make eye contact with a classmate at the moment the teacher was saying something like “glans penis.” All you had to do was look at someone in the right light and then they would basically hack into your brain like that cordyceps fungus and all rational thought was out the window, judging by the things people did. 

His mother sat him down shortly after she learned they had been discussing these issues in health class, after she was done writing a sternly worded letter to the school board. You should wait for marriage, blah blah. Eddie looked past her and out the window where there were birds swarming around the feeder. Sure, uh-huh. He went upstairs to his room, put his pillow in his lap and punched it. Then he put his face in it and laughed until he felt lightheaded. 

Love was supposed to be about taking care. That much had also been made clear to him by his mother. He was getting bored of being on the receiving end of that. He laid awake worrying sometimes he was being pigeonholed, like a typecast actor, in such a role in his every relationship. He was getting to be really sick of being ruffled on the head. He was getting to be really sick of being Paul Simon to everybody else’s Chevy Chase in the “You Can Call Me Al” video. He tried dedicating himself to fixing up his car, which worked for a while, until it got hot and he was obliged to do it in shorts and Richie could not stop giving him shit. (This should have been an early hint. One of many early hints.) He tried listening to bands like Black Flag and Descendents (_Parents! Why won’t they shut up!_) but he found the music kind of anxiety-inducing. He looked at himself in the mirror and tried to harden his face. He practiced saying, Don’t call me cute. Don’t call me cute. His mom called up from downstairs — “What’s that, Eddie bear?” 

He felt a little guilty, when he later thought about it, thinking of what had happened next as a gift, though it was difficult to think of what else you might call it. It had almost literally fallen from the sky. When he later thought about it, he figured he might have seen it coming for a while but endeavored to contextualize the signs with other easier patterns. He was always catching Richie looking at him and then looking away, and the albums Richie insisted he buy at the hippie record store in Lewiston (the Modern Lovers, the Feelies, Galaxie 500, “They’ll change your life, Eds”) always seemed more than a little pointed. He himself looked across their English classroom from time to time watching Richie trying to astrally project himself out the window solely by the power of abject desperation, wondering if anybody else noticed that there were indented red marks like scar tissue inside the bridge of Richie's nose where his glasses rested against his face. Anyway, the first two times Richie said something Eddie laughed it off, and then laid awake for a few hours staring at the old fluorescent prints on the ceiling and thinking about jumping out the window. 

The third time it was kind of hard to believe he was lying. He was so naked that for a horrifying moment Eddie could almost understand his own mother’s scheming and desperate protective machinations. It was basically like raising chicks from eggs in kindergarten, which was probably an attempt to ensnare impressionable children in the dungeon of heteronormativity by indoctrinating them with parental instinct. Regardless, it was the reference point Eddie returned to when he forced himself to reflect on the fear that somebody else would see Richie like that. That somebody else would see — really see! — him at all. That by virtue of this moment existing (the agony of all bliss) it would have to be over, eventually. That he would have to let this go. That it would have to go toddling out of his grubby hands and face-plant on the itchy carpet the way one of the kindergarten chicks had, and that this time he could not cry. 

After that — there was a strange and sometimes wonderful time after that. They walked together in the woods. Once in the dead of winter they went to Portland and held hands in the art museum, exhilarated and terrified. They fell asleep in each other's beds and set alarms for dawn to creep home through the silent foggy streets with lips tingling and circumvent parental suspicion. They roasted each other violently at the arcade to circumvent suspicion among their friends. On more than one occasion he woke up in the night because he could feel Richie tracing letters on his bare back with the tip of his finger, and he pretended he was asleep until he actually fell asleep again. 

It was all surprising, but most surprising was that it went on as long as it did, and that it kept going even after it was over, so that it was never really over, it just changed form, like water, or like a song. 

\--

Somewhere in Connecticut, Eddie’s car mounted a rise and the static scuffed and rolled. He would have denied the quickness with which he reached for the volume dial, but as the highway descended again into yet another of southern New England’s gentle wavelike dells so did the flash of sharp sound into white noise. He also would have denied that he swore. It was full dark now, and he could feel the night chill through the windows. Sometimes amidst the trees that lined the road he could see rags of dirty snow. The infrequent mileage signs showed the encroaching inevitability of Springfield. By Eddie’s light up watch when he dared to check it was 7:24. There was time. 

He chanced a glimpse into the rearview toward the sunset. The heavy thunderclouds visible in the last light must have followed him from New York. He imagined himself dragging them like balloons or tin cans behind honeymooners.

He crossed into Massachusetts, hit Springfield. When the static flared again he frantically punched the seek/scan button, which settled on 91.5FM. This station played L7 and Hole and the Gits until it too faded out as he merged off the highway in Northampton and pulled into the most adjacent parking lot, which turned out to accompany the docks and boathouses for the UMass rowing crew teams. The lot was empty and pitch-dark except for the weak light from a squalid payphone booth. It was 8:02pm. Eddie hit seek/scan in the wrong direction on purpose, and he opened the car door, letting a blast of cold air in, because of his near certainty he was going to vomit. 

The scanner returned to the high eighties. He pressed it very slowly, knowing any press could be the pivotal press. It was like — his mind retrieved some strange memory which was not his memory but was a memory he had seen before, like a memory from a movie or one of Richie’s memories he had inherited or caught like a disease — walking into a haunted house. Extreme trepidation to avoid the creaks. And then that terrible thing jumped out from the shadows with its concentric hagfish teeth bared, but it was just R.E.M.’s “Crush With Eyeliner.” 

Eddie closed the car door and took his seatbelt off. His heart had thrown the fucking brakes on but was in his throat still. For a minute aimlessly he went rooting around in assorted compartments for an old inhaler he thought might be somewhere. On the radio Stipe went through some classic gibberish and then a lyrical crux: “We all invent ourselves, and you know me…” 

This seemed pointed. Eddie wondered if Richie played every show assuming he was listening, then kicked himself for the thought. His heart picked up the closer the song came to the familiar fade-out, and by the time the noise disappeared he realized he had tightened every muscle in his body in preparation for impact. 

The typical college radio orchestral tune-up ensued — dead air, coughing, twinging, squeaking old equipment, awkward hesitation. At last the overture: 

“You’re listening to WMUA Amherst, 91.1FM,” Richie said. Richie said! That was his voice. His voice, Eddie thought, buoyed by terror. “I’m Rich, this is Total Trash — ”

“TOTAL TRASH,” shrieked a girl. Eddie’s… gallbladder or something exploded. 

“We’ve got Claire Mitchell in the studio,” Richie said delightedly. “We’ve been stridently instructed to behave.” 

There was a squealing noise — the microphone being bent in an unfriendly direction. “In case you’ve missed the previous iterations of this program,” said the girl called Claire, “Rich has dropped at least six of the seven deadly words on air.” 

Richie in the background, genuinely curious. “Which one haven’t I said?”

Claire took a breath. Then there was a chorus of laughter. 

“If you call in and guess correctly,” Richie deadpanned toward the mic, a heretofore unheard Voice, like a cattle auctioneer, “I’ll suck your — ”

“Rich!”

“What?”

“That’s the one! Stop!”

They collected themselves. They sounded like they were having fun. 

“413 638 2044,” Richie recited. “But in the meantime, Claire, we were having kind of a serious conversation.”

“We were?” Then she laughed. “Serious for you!”

“The point is that music alone can approach the great unsaid.” Clicks and whirs. Claire was quiet but for a sound like the squeaking of her swivel chair. “Here’s a song if you want proof.”

Eddie lashed out desperately at the radio and briefly believed he might manage one of those great feats of strength people could sometimes do under duress, like lifting an entire truck off a baby, except to physically remove the radio from the console and throw it out the window. But he only managed to turn up the volume. 

“Obscure b-side by some lads from London,” Richie went on. “A magical tune with mind boggling emotional resonance… this is ‘Beachcoma’ by Blur…” 

The guitar descended, like a curtain opening, and then the drums embraced the chords. Eddie sank deeply into his seat and for a moment he closed his eyes. There was a thunderstormish melancholy to it, like the very still moments just before it began to rain when you could smell the storm but not yet feel it and the colors of everything were unfathomably bright against the gray. There was no chorus but rather a kind of wish that hung in the motionless air before the guitar dropped out and swept through: 

_My dear and special friend, there's never a point at which we end… _

A shiver went up and down his spine and did not quite let him go again. He turned up the heat, embraced himself tightly over his flannel. Eventually he rested his forehead against the steering wheel. Dimly he understood that if anybody else came through this parking lot they were probably going to think he had overdosed. 

_The point at which I looked at you has always been marked on my brain_

_Now my mind is in a whirl and it seems I am not the same_

_My dear and special friend… _

“Friend” gave him pause. “Friend” had to have been pointed. But “friend” was maybe not the exact right word for someone — well, given that the memories of Richie that ranked most vividly in Eddie’s mental echelon were decidedly not “friendly.” Or maybe they were in a Shakespearean or Victorian sense. A “friend” was not really a person whose bony kind of wingish hips one would sit on in his bed while his mom was downstairs drunk watching soap operas and press one's open mouth against his cheekbone against the pinkish scar one had not-so-long-ago bandaged so that one could taste his frustrated tears and then put one’s mouth by his ear and say (basically a boldfaced lie, knowing he knew that because no doubt he could feel one trembling but also knowing that he chose to believe it and feeling the extreme power conferred by this certainty coursing through one’s entire body basically like a golden blood), I can wait another million years for you to be still… One did not hold one's friend’s head against one’s chest in the subsequent supple darkness, breathing really deeply his unwashed hair, which was fine and comparatively non-gross because his face was in one's armpit and anyway it was all already moot when it came to sharing gross things given what had just happened; one did not try to stay awake as hard as one could in order to feel one's friend fall asleep against one, like feel his mouth open and his breath kind of slow down and his brow unfurrow and try to think loud enough to be heard inside his dreams, only I can see through you, only I can see through you, only you can see through me. 

“Friend” was maybe more like the person — he touched something inside his mind which flinched away. He thought he could remember — but maybe it was a dream — they were kids again, and Richie’s hands were on his face… 

Something turned brighter in the song, as though the clouds had stretched thin enough for the sun to break through. Eddie’s mind followed it just enough to break whatever spell, and he forgot that almost-memory again, and it would stay forgotten for another twenty years. 

In the car, with his head against the steering wheel, he squeezed his eyes as tightly shut as they would go. Something hot slipped down the join of his nose and cheek. He sat up and tried a steeling-himself breath, but it was kind of a laugh-sob. 

Slowly the song faded into another of not dissimilar tone. It had those spark-scraping guitars that Richie liked — the ones that sounded like stars exploding. The singer was meditating on the pain of uneven love in an exceedingly posh British accent. “You really cut into me” was the repeated refrain. Did Richie feel cut into? Did he feel sensitive and flayed? Good riddance, Eddie thought before he could stop himself. He was the one who had fucking left without saying anything! 

Eddie looked up and cast desperately around the empty lot. For a moment he allowed himself to pretend his vision was blurry because a misty rain had kicked up from the low clouds, but when he got out of the car, leaving the door open and dinging aimlessly into the night, leaving the music blaring into the silence — 

_I never thought that you knew me_

_I never thought that you knew me_

— the sky was clearing, and the night above was bright with stars. He went to the payphone booth and dropped a quarter in and dialed the number Richie had recited before he could think twice about it. 

Entire universes were born and died between the rings, exploding and imploding quick as hummingbird breath. At last Richie answered in his Southern Belle Voice, breathless and sweet, like he had been waiting by the phone all day and all the night previous and yet still endeavored to pretend he didn’t care: “This is Total Trash.” 

Eddie’s knees basically liquified. It is, he almost said, or, you are, or, I love you still, I love you back, my dear and special friend… 

“Cocksucker!” he blurted instead. 

Silence, except for the song tinnily playing back in the studio on the other end of the line, and the song playing from Eddie’s car, offset by moments, and the distant roar of the river down the bank under the old railroad bridge. The moon slipped free from a sheaf of cloud and refracted blindingly through the fingerprinted, sandpaper-scratched glass panes of the booth. This was the kind of phone booth where you looked at the moon and thought, the person on the other end is looking at the same moon. But of course Richie was looking at the same fucking moon because they were ten miles apart. 

“The word you haven’t said.” His voice was high and light. He remembered this from somewhere deep: the old impossible guilty laughter glassblown into stumbling words. “You didn't say cocksucker, cocksucker.” 

\---

\--

\- 

** III.  **

Rich was in one of those nihilistic moods, Claire decided. He was prone to these, usually after he failed exams. He would show up, having flapped across campus like an injured raptor bird in his Doc Martens and ramshackle layers — that outfit that screamed, I’m from distant Maine, most evil reaches, and will try to make out with the most popular senior jock _and_ his girlfriend at the biggest frat party of the year just to get beat up, don’t fucking test me — and kick the self-deprecating humor up to eleven, then suggest they go to one of the bars on Route 9 that didn’t card and get blackout drunk, whether or not it was 10am on a Wednesday. Worse, Claire had taken him up on it more than once in recent weeks because she had recently been unceremoniously dumped by the poetry MFA student she was seeing, who she had mostly been seeing because this woman was friends with David Berman, but it still hurt. 

Anyway, this time (he had gotten a C on an art history paper, which wasn’t even all that bad, Claire tried to tell him) Rich had instead asked her to hang out with him in the studio, where he promised (on the message he’d left on the answering machine in her dorm room) he'd have a flask of vodka. He was prone to throwing himself against walls to see if the shell would crack. She hadn’t seen it happen yet but wasn’t giving up without a fight. 

Rich was an odd duck, but Claire was too. They had met at an orientation “conversation group” targeted toward students from rural New England. Claire was actually from Troy, New York, but nobody was asking for specifics, and she didn’t talk much, except to nod and vaguely agree with random statements with scattered hmms and yeahs. Rich was sitting next to her, and he had dirt under his fingernails, and then he buried the heels of his hands in his eyes, shoving his glasses up his forehead, occasionally trying badly to conceal obvious laughter. Afterward they went out together into the bright afternoon. “I’m from Troy,” Claire told Rich, who was walking just behind her like he wanted to talk to her but didn’t know what to say. He was tall and good looking but Claire mostly liked girls, and anyway he didn’t exactly smell good, not technically bad but also not good. “You know, Vonnegut’s Ilium? I’m researching a poem.” 

She watched him evaluate if he found her attractive. This was the way people did things in college. He seemed not quite sure of the result. “How do you research a poem?” 

“It can’t just come from nowhere.”

“What’s it about?”

“Cognitive dissonance.” 

He studied her and then smiled huge. “What the fuck is that?”

They walked together toward the dining commons. “Nothing is special about being from rural New England,” Rich said. 

“Really? I mean — ”

“It’s cold and dark. I mean, it’s like the Ethan Frome _it’s your misfortune and none of my own _thing.” 

“There’s always pictures of the leaves changing,” Claire remembered. “My mom and dad always had Yankee Magazine by the toilet.”

“That’s where it belongs!” 

Claire was not a bad poet, people said. In her intro composition class, she sometimes felt like a wrestler on steroids — as though her entrance into the ring, soundtracked by Sabbath’s “War Pigs” or something, automatically reduced the opposition to paroxysms of terrified grief. Rich found this image, which she described in a poem she shared with him and not with the class, completely hilarious. He got slots spinning records on the campus radio at hours nobody wanted and played music that was utterly insane, including but not limited to 30-minute Throbbing Gristle deep cuts at two in the afternoon and b-sides from obscure britpop cassettes he paid exorbitant fees to have shipped to Massachusetts. When he knew she was listening he played “Planet Claire” by the B-52s. When drunk he was interesting. He talked confusingly and sometimes disturbingly about what he considered an extreme trauma, the possibility he did not remember something vitally important, and also about having made a stupid mistake having to do in equal parts with totally possessing first love and the omnipresent specter of suffocating adolescent self-loathing. They kissed once, in Claire’s dorm room watching _Withnail and I_, and never again. They each hooked up with various and sundry and conducted coded debriefs over breakfast: 

“She,” Claire said of the poetry MFA girl, toward the beginning of the whole affair, in January, when she and Rich had been among an elite cadre of students who stayed on campus during winter break under the guise of taking a few one-credit courses but mostly smoking weed and watching movies on the projectors in the art history lecture halls. “Her thighs, man.” 

The girl in question was across the library, crouching on the floor to look at a reference encyclopedia. Claire had pointed her out to Rich and then ducked behind a shelf of magazines. “She's got jeans on,” Rich stage-whispered. 

“But you can kind of see,” Claire said. “Their sheer power.” 

“I guess!” 

“Dick,” Claire said, just to watch his face twitch, “name one single person you’ve ever seen with more supreme thighs.” 

“Carter Matheson,” Rich said immediately, naming the current champion long jumper in New England, who was a chemistry student two years ahead of them. 

“He doesn't count. I’m talking about natural thighs.” 

“It's all subjective anyway, thighs,” Rich said absently, flipping through the _Globe _on top of the magazine shelf. 

“I basically want her to suffocate me with them,” Claire told him, all pretense gone. 

“Yeah. I know the feeling.” 

They borrowed friends’ cars and drove around in the hills and went to seedy diners where they queued up Iggy Pop and Bowie and the Velvet Underground on the dusty jukeboxes. Claire wrote a poem about Rich which made it into the student literary magazine, functionally guaranteeing he would never read it: 

_Friend, I find you fitting_  
_Some black magic litany. Remembrance and forgetting._  
_Forgetting is the better thing._  
_Meanwhile I lie awake wondering and wishing_  
_How to write over my own mind. How to rewind the tape and record again_  
_Over the parts I cannot watch. The jump scares, the blood._  
_How to put your nothingness there,  
_ _How to envy your nothingness. _

Unfortunately he was her best and sometimes only friend.

The studio was located in the deepest and most sulfurous bowels of the math building, for some reason, and by the time Claire found it Rich was already spinning something off the latest R.E.M. record. “Thurston Moore sings backup vocals on this,” he said by way of greeting when he saw Claire in the door. Then he unearthed the promised flask from one of the pockets of the big duck coat he had slung over the back of his chair and pressed it into Claire’s hand. He was wearing a blinding orange and green flannel under his Dinosaur Jr shirt, and had recently cut himself shaving, judging by the tiny piece of toilet paper attached to his jaw with blood. As usual, he needed a haircut. “How’s being dumped?” 

“The pain has reached a dull roar,” said Claire, coming around to check out the equipment. 

“The worst part,” Rich agreed. Somehow he knew this but never really talked about how he knew this except cryptically when drunk. “Let's play it.” 

“Let’s play what?” 

“Let’s play it on the radio!” 

Claire collapsed into the squeaky swivel chair not currently stocked with Rich’s assorted belongings. “Oh my god.” 

“Exposure therapy, Claire,” Rich said in his British accent, snapping his fingers. She thought of this frequently deployed character as ‘harried gay psychoanalyst.’ “We have to inoculate ourselves with the dead virus.” 

“I'm scared.” 

“It can't hurt you unless you have a weakened immune system.” 

“This metaphor does not work, _Dickie,_” Claire told him, downing a swig from the flask. Though Rich had promised vodka, it was actually really bad gin. Just as well! 

Rich shook his entire body in disgust at the nickname. “When you say that it makes me think my parents named me after Nixon.” 

“Honey, I have bad news for you…” 

Rich collapsed to his knees and feigned violently puking into the trash can. Then he got up and started going through his bag as though nothing had happened. He had found this dinged-up leather briefcase at the Northampton Flea on Route 47 and stocked it with all the tapes and CDs and records he was obliged to carry from his dorm room to the studio to supplement the radio station's massive yet evidently incomplete library. From the mess of items he unearthed Blur’s _For Tomorrow _single on compact disc. 

“Please no britpop,” Claire begged uselessly. 

“Gonna play one of the b-sides,” Rich told her. He put on the voice of a monster truck rally announcer. “Get ready to be emotionally crushed.” 

He nudged the CD into the player as he faded the R.E.M. song out, and then he did the station ID as was FCC regulation and Claire grabbed the mic because he was being an idiot and they laughed and she goaded him, mostly to put off the necessary Event which was going to be having to listen to the song. He introduced it so glowingly that she rolled her eyes, and then he switched the mic off and pressed play, tracing the descending guitar intro with the fingers of his free hand. 

It was a pretty song. The quantity of guitar tracks was kind of trance-inducing. Rich leaned forward from where he had perched on the edge of his chair and shifted up the volume of the playback so that it was sinus-clearingly loud. Claire leaned back in her chair and allowed it to wash over her. It struck her that it was a love song of necessary doomedness. The repeated lyrical sentiments had this charming innocence, but then even more guitar tracks swept in like stormclouds and dragged the chorus away before it was even really over. 

“What’s it called again,” she asked Rich. 

“Beachcoma.” 

Claire tried the title in her mouth. “Beach coma.” 

“You ever have one of those days…” 

They looked at each other and she sensed he would not elaborate. “Yeah,” she said. 

They shared a secret by means of brainwaves. Claire was thinking of the poetry MFA student — lying in her lap in the cold sun through the attic garret window in Sunderland. Bikini Kill on the boombox: _Do you believe there's anything beyond troll guy reality? _

Rich was thinking of something similar but probably with a different song. Half the story was visible in his big bright-dark eyes like the reflection of a TV screen in a window across the room. 

For a while she thought they might finally let themselves and each other actually talk about it, but then Rich got up. Being a college radio DJ was a good activity for someone with potentially diagnosable hyperactivity. As the song played Rich had something to do with each hand and with the rest of his body. He kind of hummed along with the weirdest swooping guitar bits from somewhere deep inside his chest. He unearthed a cassette from the briefcase and switched the playback so he could rewind it to the right song, then he flipped the playback back over to Blur and disappeared briefly into the stacks. Unfortunately he returned with a vinyl LP of Luna’s _Bewitched, _which he set up on the turntable and calibrated precisely to “I Know You Tried.” 

“You have got to be kidding me, Dick,” Claire said. 

He couldn't wink, so he closed both eyes, but the right one more, wrinkling the old scar under his nose. With everything squared away he turned back to the mixing board and waited for some mysterious cue in the song audible only to him, at which point he started the cassette player whirring and pushed the slider up as he dragged the CD slider down, tuning the songs into each other. Claire grabbed the tape case from the the desk and inspected it — it was a record called _Against Perfection _by a band horrifically named Adorable. She looked up at Rich, who shrugged. “I went through the Creation Records catalog while extremely stoned,” he explained. “What are we playing next?” 

“Something angrier,” Claire suggested. “You're just picking sad stuff.” 

“This song is kind of angry!” 

“This anger-to-sad ratio is like, 30-70, and I’m looking for something more 60-40.” 

“Uh, let me just dig out my calculator and all my spreadsheets…” 

She ignored him. “Where’s the PJ Harvey?” 

The studio phone rang, startling them both. They stared at it, but all it did was ring again. “Does this — ”

“No one’s ever called me before!” 

“Well fucking pick it up, come on!” 

Rich did. He answered the same way he did his dorm phone: with a Southern accent, for some reason, and a dulcet tone of voice that suggested he was curling his hair around his finger. “This is Total Trash.” 

Claire reached behind him and picked up the briefcase full of tapes and records from the back of his chair. She didn’t even want to know where to begin with the stacks, which looked like they were stocked with vinyl going back to approximately 1934, so she was going to have to work from here. Eventually she unearthed the object she knew to be Rich’s most prized possession: his 7” of Pavement’s _Slay Tracks._ This went on the second turntable next to _Bewitched _and Claire lined the needle up with A1, “You’re Killing Me.” 

She looked over to Rich’s chair, holding the sleeve aloft, but he had disappeared. She followed the translucent phone cord, stretched over the mixing board and the desk, into the stacks, where Rich had leaned himself up against the packed _J-S EXPERIMENTAL _shelves to murmur hushedly into the receiver. 

“Yeah,” he whispered. Whispered! “Okay. Yeah. I — Eds — ” 

She heard dialtone from the other end of the line, but he held the receiver to his ear for another beat in which time seemed to stand still and even the music blasting through the playback speakers seemed to slow or pause. It was uncanny (Claire had just read the Freud essay on the subject) to see him motionless. _Rich.exe has stopped working_. He hung up the phone with soundless gentleness, as though it were a priceless antique, and then he turned back toward Claire like a person in a trance or otherwise like Madeline Usher emerging from the basement in her white shroud. Their eyes met with shared bewilderedness. 

Claire could not help herself. “_Eds_?” 

The sound of her voice seemed to remind him where he was. He put the version of himself that she knew back on so overzealously she almost wondered when he’d had time to overdose on speed. The bouncing atoms constituting his being had evidently started to vibrate at the rough BPM of a Bad Brains song. 

“We have to change it,” he basically yelled, totally unnecessarily in the tiny room, rocketing past Claire toward the equipment only to stand there pulling his hair out. “The next song, _please_, Claire; side A, track three, ‘Friendly Advice,’ _please_!” 

All of a sudden Claire could not stop laughing. But she lifted the needle from the Luna record and turned it over and dropped it again on track three. “I always liked Galaxie 500 better,” she said, mostly to see what he would say. 

Rich was layering himself rapidly in his threadbare sweater and duck coat and scarf. “Yes, me too, but I mean, they got Sterling Morrison on guitar; you can cover the rest of this for me, right?”

He was serious! He was fucking leaving! “Oh my god,” Claire said. 

“You can do it.” If he was trying to psych her up it wasn’t working. “You can keep my case. You were getting the hang of it earlier.”

“Rich, I’ve been here for twenty minutes.”

The previous song started to fade out. Rich grabbed Claire’s hands (a fine tremor in his) and put them in the right places to fade out the cassette player and fade in the turntable, then he set the record spinning and Luna launched into “Friendly Advice.” _I had to be drunk just to look at your face…_ “See,” he said, “you’ve got it.”

“Who the hell was that on the phone? Wait — was it — ”

“Claire, I shit you not when I say this is a matter of life and death.”

“So it _was_ your drug dealer…”

“I’ll get us into one of those poetry department parties so you can finally meet Berman, please for the love of god just do this for me.” 

“How are you going to do that?”

“I’ll buy a bunch of cocaine.”

This actually was an alright plan. “Okay,” Claire said. “Give me some.”

“Done. Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

He was three quarters of the way out the door. “Play some love songs?” 

“Um, sure…”

“Maybe some Modern Lovers?”

“Rich, just stay here and fucking do your own show if you’re going to micromanage me like this!” 

He flashed her a brilliant grin, and then he disappeared. In his wake a percussive symphony of Doc Martens clattering down the echoey tile hallway and the slamming of a series of successive doors. Then Claire was alone in a dark and dusty room before a suite of complicated broadcasting equipment and FCC protocol posters she barely understood, with only the endless guitar solo from “Friendly Advice” to keep her company. 

“What the fuck just happened,” she said aloud to herself. 

He was going to seriously owe her one, she thought, stepping back toward the station’s dizzying library of rock vinyl in search of the necessaries. Serving as her wingman and fixer with the poetry department was going to be the half of it. He was going to owe her details, she thought, even as she knew he would never tell; indeed he would never speak to her about this night in all their friendship, except to thank her for playing “I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms” two days later when she next saw him in the dining commons after his art history lecture, still in his same clothes from Tuesday, looking even more disheveled than usual. Sitting in their customary back corner, picking at dining services’ meager attempts at Chinese food, Claire asked Rich if he was okay, meaning it, and he nodded and said, I think so. That was the end of that, but they were friends for many, many years after college, even living together for a time in Los Angeles until Claire moved to womyn’s land in Oregon and then onto a girlfriend’s farm in Michigan, and the back of their friendship wasn’t necessarily broken but was never quite as strong as it had once been after that simply by virtue of distance, but even then occasionally they would send one another postcards. 

Ideas were congealing together slowly inside her mind, and eventually she was obliged to find one of the paper DJ log templates and scribble down a few lines on the back of it: 

_Broadcast vibration_  
_I am speaking to you across the valley_  
_Even if you are not listening_  
_Love is in the sound  
_ _Love is the sound_

\--

_Log from Total Trash with DJ Rich Tozier, Tuesday, March 7, 1995: _

R.E.M., “Crush with Eyeliner” from Monster  
Blur, “Beachcoma” from For Tomorrow single  
Adorable, “Cut 2” from Against Perfection  
Luna, “Friendly Advice” from Bewitched  
Galaxie 500, “Leave the Planet” from On Fire  
Echo and the Bunnymen, “Lips Like Sugar” from s/t  
Throwing Muses, “Not Too Soon” from the Real Ramona  
Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love” from Hounds of Love  
Liz Phair, “Flower” from Exile in Guyville   
Syd Barrett, “Terrapin” from The Madcap Laughs  
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, “Hurricane” from Admonishing the Bishops  
Morphine, “Good” from Good  
The Modern Lovers, “I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms,” from s/t  
Nirvana, “Love Buzz” from Bleach  
PJ Harvey, “Meet Ze Mostra” from To Bring You My Love  
Sonic Youth, “Pacific Coast Highway” from Sister  
The Breeders, “Divine Hammer” from Last Splash   
fIREHOSE, “Sometimes” from if’n  
Pavement, “Heaven is a Truck” from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain  
Dinosaur Jr, “Freak Scene” from Bug  
Pixies, “Break My Body” from Surfer Rosa  
My Bloody Valentine, “Only Shallow” from Loveless  
The Cranberries, “Dreams” from Everybody’s Doing It, So Why Can’t We?   
Cocteau Twins, “Sugar Hiccup” from Head Over Heels  
Portishead, “Sour Times” from Dummy  
Spacemen 3, “Set Me Free / I’ve Got the Key” from Recurring  
Mazzy Star, “So Tonight That I Might See” from So Tonight That I Might See  
New Order, “Temptation” from Substance  
Talking Heads, “This Must Be the Place” from Speaking in Tongues

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> [richie and claire's show on apple music](https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/3-7-95/pl.u-d2b0m4YC3xEWL) // [richie and claire's show on spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/06K6Tl76fhopzjSl8HAgZ9?si=sOVbxTTUSvmViPdzxLYe5g) (note that adorable's against perfection is not on apple music or spotify - ["cut 2"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHrhcejighY) is here on youtube)  
[the unmarked tape](https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/pl.u-11zB5NySz4mGN)  
["my tulpa" by magazine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFEaTCP3vOc)
> 
> some other things:  
matheson's lobster shack does not exist (sorry) but is loosely inspired by two lights lobster shack in cape elizabeth, maine  
i was a DJ and music director and for a time general manager at 91.5FM, one of the college radio stations mentioned in this story. all the college radio tidbits in this story are based on my experience there in 2009-13  
[the "you can call me al" video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq-gYOrU8bA)... peak comedy!  
["total trash"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dknzzBkX7U) is a sonic youth song from daydream nation  
david berman, the poet and songwriter who recorded as silver jews, and a umass amherst poetry MFA alum, passed away in early august... his song ["blue arrangements"](https://genius.com/Silver-jews-blue-arrangements-lyrics) is anachronistic for the story but is very r&e so i hearkened to him here in tribute.


End file.
